'I loved it.'
'Great choice.'
'My son grabbed it the minute we arrived and then my daughter read it. She was distraught when she realised it wasn't true.'
'I couldn't put it down.'
I can't believe it. For the first time in years the book club has reached a happy consensus. Everybody liked Fieldwork. My choice. This too is a first. As those of you who remember the last book club meeting where Siri Hustvedt went down like birth control at a Catholic sleep-over, my suggestions are not always so enthusiastically received.
'I don't understand why I haven't heard about it before - it's such a good book,' says Marianne, settling herself at the dinner table behind her salad of barley and pomegranate seeds (nicer than it sounds). Precisely my point. I know we at Pedantic shouldn't complain with White Tiger winning the Booker and The Cellist of Sarajevo being Richard and Judified, but I'm still astonished that Fieldwork slipped under most people's radar last year.
'I think it's the first book we've all liked,' says Jamie, our host, plonking down vat of couscous with moghrabia and oven-dried tomatoes.
'What about Kevin?' says Eva, peeling the clingfilm off a bowl of sweet potatoes with pecans (everybody, apparently, got Ottolenghi for Christmas).
'Did we all like that?' I wonder, taking the foil off Tesco's hummus with coriander which I've decanted onto a plate (everyone, that is, except me - my favourite present was a bottle of Kettel One vodka and I'm not sharing that with anyone).
'I hated it,' says Nel. Her offering is pineapple, red pepper, almonds, nigella seeds and spring onion. She's clearing out her fridge.
We begin a long, heated discussion about what variously alerted us to the fact that despite broaching the last taboo of mothers who don't love their offspring, Lionel Shriver didn't have children.
'Or even want them!' adds one of our number, somewhat vociferously for a woman whose two kids are away at boarding school.
'Speaking of which, mine is dropping out of university and coming home to live,' wails another.
A groan of collective sympathy runs round the table, as we momentarily pause, forks on lips, to offer advice.
'Have you tried to disuade her?'
'I sent her a five page email..'
'Charge her rent,' I suggest (whose own drop-out son's sole contribution to the household in 6 months has been to lend me a fiver to pay the cleaner a month or so ago).
'Chapter five...' the poor beleaguered mother replies.
'Make her get a job,' says another.
'Page four...' she responds.
'But you do like her, I mean, you do get on, don't you?' asks Jamie.
'I love her, but I just can't come home to her sitting on the sofa every day when I've been up since six.'
Another collective and hearfelt groan is uttered through mouthfuls of healthy vegetarian food. Yep, we all love our kids but we don't actually want them hanging around past their boss-by date and faced with the more pressing problem of nest-returning fledglings who have long ago grown into full-sized birds with their own television preferences and laundry, Fieldwork is never mentioned again.
However, the important thing is - they liked it. It's a good book. Buy it. Read it.
'By the way, does anyone here really like Pinter?' asks Nel, a screenwriter and film director with a big fat shiny Bafta on her mantlepiece.
There's a small chorus of 'God nos' and one or two uncomfortable silences, most notably from the one of our number who works in the theatre. I remind you that Nel is the person who took me to see Mexican wrestling before Christmas when everyone else was camped out at the Barbican.
'My niece is doing A level drama and frightfully keen on the theatre and she wanted me to take her to see some Beckett. Well, thank God Godot isn't on until April...'
'And so, presumably, you're waiting for him...' I say quickly (well, come on, she fed me the line).
There's a withering glance and more groaning, if anything even more disgusted than that which heralded the question about Pinter.
'...well, anyway, so at least I was spared that, but it meant I had to take her to see Pinter's No Man's Land and there were people in the audience with the script on their knees! And all there ruddy pauses. My niece had an ice cream and when she was scraping the last bits out of the bottom of the tub the man in front of us, who was one of those with the bloody script on his knee, turned round and shushed her. Can anyone explain to me why he's so revered?'
We all look at Jamie whose theatre put on The Birthday Party last year. She coughs and then hesitatingly gives us a fifteen minute lecture on the genius that is Pinter with a lot of mentions of 'debt to', that was something like the spider who swallowed the fly, but with playwrites.
We have our own short pause while we absorb our new literary knowledge.
'He didn't get on with his son,' adds Jamie.
Much meaningful nodding, though I still don't know what it was supposed to infer.
Another pause.
'I sat next to Antonia Fraser at the Hairdresser's the other day,' says Penny. 'She's very beautiful.'
'But, she has terrible hair,' offers Nel, definitively. 'We used to share the same hairdresser and he said she had simply terrible hair.'
'Your hair is looking nice,' says Jamie to Francesca.
We all nod.
Yup. Who the hell needs Pinter?
